The World Wide Web (WWW) has become an increasingly popular entertainment and information medium for consumers. The popularity of the WWW has led to the commercialization of this new medium. As a result, the WWW has become a significant new medium for commerce, which is referred to as electronic commerce or E-commerce. Vendors offer goods and services for sale via various WWW sites. For example, a vendor may sell computers, entertainment media, or computer software over the WWW via an online store. Security mechanisms, such as the well-known Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol standard have been developed to provide secure electronic transactions of sensitive data (e.g., encryption of financial data) over the Internet.
Advertising on the WWW represents another strategy for generating revenue through the popularity of the WWW. For example, a WWW site can sell advertising space on its frequently visited home page (e.g., www.yahoo.com). Statistics on the number of hits on any given static HTML page of the WWW site can be maintained to determine the popularity of the WWW page.